 |
WE CAN DO BETTER: In response to a bug found in bitcoin's software that, if exploited, could have subverted the 21 million ceiling on the number of coins, community leaders are doing some soul-searching and hand-wringing.
Some are calling for larger companies in the ecosystem to perform more thorough testing. "Currently a lot of companies don't contribute anything to Core development,” said bitcoin sub-reddit moderator Theymos.
But there's also a sense of collective guilt. "Yes, we screwed up but the 'we' that screwed up is very wide," said Bitcoin Core maintainer Wladimir van der Laan. The whole community screwed up by not reviewing consensus changes thoroughly enough."
Yet aside from greater vigilance on the part of those able to review code, another idea to protect the network is to have more versions of the software.
The Bitcoin Core software runs on most of the network's nodes; more diverse implementations might allow the network to stay up and running in the event that one was infected with a devastating bug — though it might also introduce other problems. Full Story
OUTTA HERE: Four early employees and two contractors have resigned from Block.one, the company that launched the $5 billion EOS blockchain.
The team have joined a new stealth project called StrongBlock. "We left because we saw a need in the blockchain marketplace that Block.one was not going to address," one of the defectors said. Full Story
CUT US SOME SLACK: At the Concordia Summit in New York, regulators, innovators and crypto-enthusiats discussed the impact regulations were having on innovation in the crypto-space.
Eva Kaili, a member of the European Parliament representing Greece, declared, "One thing that we have in the E.U. and the U.K. — we have too many regulations that can at least delay the innovation. In blockchain, we tend to move very fast."
Even regulatory "sandboxes," which have been touted as a way to allow innovation in a controlled setting, were descrbed by another panelist as being too cumbersome and doubling or tripling the workload for startups and small companies. Full Story |
|
|
|
|
 |
 $704 million — that's the amount of funding raised through Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in August. This was was up 9 percent from July's $680 million but remarkably down 86 percent from June's $5.4 billion raise amount. There were 52 ICO deals which is lower than the past few months, when the count stayed north of 60. November 2017 saw similar levels at 50 deals. 52 percent of ICOs had identifiable etherscan addresses as well. For more research insights check out the CoinDesk Research section here. |
|
SPONSOR SECTION
 Get an in-depth look at the economics of the bitcoin marketplace from CME Group's leading economists. Explore parallels to commodity markets' inelastic supply, dig into the impacts of demand for bitcoin, and see how CME Bitcoin futures help facilitate access and risk management to this rapidly developing asset class. Access paper. |
|
| | NO MAN'S LAND: The predicted bullish swing in bitcoin is on hold as the price fell around 3 percent today to $6,400. It had recieved a boost from the rally in altcoins over the weekend but as interest in them died down so it did for BTC. Full Story |
 |
BEST OF THE BEST:
FINANCIAL TIMES: The paper offers a close look at the UN World Food Programme's efforts to help refugees in countries like Jordan access basic amenities such as food and shelter using blockchain and biometrics.
Iris scans are used for identification, and the blockchain keeps track of transactions and payments.
The Building Blocks program is billing the technology as a potential way for refugees, be they Rohingya, Somali or Syrian, to take control of their identities in their nomadic lives.
THE REST:
INVERSE: In another humanitarian use case, this site reports that blockchain is helping clean up the oceans. In a roundabout way, perhaps.
In Haiti for the past three years Plastic Bank has been operating a solution built on IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric. The company aimed to help the plastic collectors of the region receive compensation without interference from criminals.
The collectors receive compensation in the form of a U.S dollar-pegged token or a barter token to buy supplies from the Plastic Bank store.
QUARTZ: In an op-ed, former GE innovation leader Maja Vujinovic, now CEO of OGroup, considers the broad implications of tokenization.
Vujinovic compares the nascent token system to the barter system of bygone eras. “These tokens, like the rice, cowries and cigarettes of the past, do not need to have value assigned by some centralized, external entity," she writes. "They can just be used in defined, specific, distinct forms of trade within a community of peers." |
We've launched our first-ever podcast, "Late Confirmation," a digest of top stories in the blockchain world, delivered daily from the team at CoinDesk and sponsored by the Oxford Blockchain Programme. |
WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER  |
|
| | | | | | |
